Can't Get you Out of my Head- Part 1

 

One event that never fails to perk my attention is the launch of a new Adam Curtis documentary. As you'll see in the background links, I've reviewed others. Adam Curtis' mixture of information, insights, technical style and subtle humour makes his films avid viewing. The BBC have just released his new one on IPlayer and I've watched Part 1. The series consists of six seventy-five minute episodes so it's best I deal with each one in its own article. The first has the alarming title of Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain; this refers to a Chinese film, see: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p093wpgw/cant-get-you-out-of-my-head-series-1-1-part-one-bloodshed-on-wolf-mountain. Alternative link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MHFrhIAj0ME. The opening narration goes: "We are living through strange days. Across Britain, Europe and America societies have become split and polarised; not just in politics, but across the whole culture. There is anger at the inequality and the ever growing corruption and a widespread distrust of the elites. Yet at the same time, there is a paralysis, a sense that no one knows how to escape from this. Even in America, where there is now hope with the new president, there are also fears that despite the growing crisis the system will just return to normal." Not a good start. Curtis is right about the first bit, but he then demonstrates that he misunderstands the cause of the corruption. Joe Biden is not the new president, he is a fake president. His staged ascendancy to the White House is not a sign of hope, but quite the opposite, see here for details: http://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2021/01/donald-trump-portal.html. I learned a lot of history though. The programme has an entire segment on the wife of Mao Zedong who was an actress (they call her an "actor") called Jiang Qing. She's an interesting figure because Mao and his comrades arranged for her to return to drama as a secret subversive force intended to change the psychology and culture of the people; something which is still going on today across the world via mind control and media propaganda, see: https://hpanwo-tv.blogspot.com/2018/02/the-bbc-and-mind-control.html. Of course no BBC programme would be complete without a good dose of white guilt and in this programme it brings up the Kenya Emergency in which the British colonial government struggled to hold onto control in the face of the Mau Mau uprising. The government went to the extremes of putting people in concentration camps where torture and mass executions took place. It also talks about the abuse experienced by the Windrush generation in the 1950's. It would be nice to have an honest discussion about this period of British history. I know I would be justified in feeling upset over these incidents; however I, like many white people, have developed a lot of scar tissue over our natural empathy for things like this, because we know that the moment we express any sorrow it will be weaponized against us. In the 1950's there was also a collective terror called the "Red Scare" where Americans feared that communists were taking over their government. This terror sometimes went way over the top, for example see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2018/12/ayn-rand-denounced-its-wonderful-life.html; but there was a reality underlying it. All the people got wrong was that the "communists" were not from the Soviet Union, they were from the forces that controlled both the USSR and the West in the Cold War. The programme refers to the Bavarian Illuminati, which was a short-lived organization that was fairly inconsequential outside Germany and only existed for a few years in the late eighteenth century. The Bavarian Illuminati must not be confused with the Illuminati. I think Curtis must have been reading Robert Anton Wilson because the next part is all about Discordianism, which I had assumed had been invented by RAW, but apparently it emerged from a discussion between two young men at a bowling alley in 1958, both of them fans of Ayn Rand. One of the creators of Discordianism, Kerry Thornley, then became friends with Lee Harvey Oswald, the man who did not...  not shoot JFK, see: https://hpanwo.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-kennedy-assassination-50-years-on.html. Ironically Kerry Thornley had contact with Jim Garrison, the public prosecutor who launched a lawsuit for the conspiracy which killed President Kennedy. Thornley had written a novel with a character thinly disguised as Oswald. It turns out that Garrison had read the book which may be where conspiracy theorists, including people like me, emerged. Garrison even accused Thornley of being involved in the Kennedy assassination. Thornley believed that conspiracy theories were just another form of control because they made people believe in an all-powerful cabal from which a sense of weakness and powerlessness emerged; and such a cabal doesn't exist. Obviously I disagree. The cabal does exist and I think I've provided evidence to support that; but in no way does it make me feel weak and powerless. On the contrary; an awareness of the true nature of how this world works is the first step to finding a way to fight the cabal and find a solution. The Discordians even carried out what in the internet age would be called a "troll". This involved writing fake letters to Playboy magazine about an imaginary conspiracy theory to see if they had an effect. It was appropriately called "Operation Mindfuck". Thornley's delusion is ironic considering what was really going on.
 
One of the other people featured is the Irish writer Ethel Boole who was also a leftist radical. She was married to Wilfred Voynich who found the famous manuscript. This is an ancient book that appears to be some kind of occult textbook written in a language nobody has ever heard of before, see: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2014/10/ben-emlyn-jones-on-cry-freedom-radio.html. Ethel Boole's father was a mathematician called George Boole who was a controversial figure in the nineteenth century because he began to apply mathematics to psychology and, again, we have a connection to the modern world and current theories of the mind, like Freudian psychoanalysis, which has been adapted into a tool of control. This is a subject that Curtis has explored many times in his past works. It also formed the basis of computer logic processes, what we call "algorithm". At the time Kerry Thornley was raving against JFK assassination theories, the CIA had a mind control operation running called MK Ultra. In a way this was part of the same idea that Mao Zedong and Jiang Qing were promoting in China. Curtis ties these threads together at the end by explaining how fake conspiracy theories merged with real conspiracies and when the internet appeared, the ideas resulting spread online in a wave of what he calls "dark paranoia". Obviously I am a part of that. But in fact most of these ideas are neither dark nor paranoid; nor are they fake. What I have been doing with HPANWO all these years is to describe that truth. The poignant tagline of the show is "The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently". This is a quote by the Occupy leader David Graeber, who died last year. Most of the time we tend to see the cycle of crises that the world constantly lurches around, like a broken carousel, as something we have no control over; almost as a force of nature, like the weather. However, it is not. It is, as Bill Hicks said, caused by decisions we all make. Yes, some of these crises are deliberate and controlled by the elite, not by us; but the elite only rule us because we let them and they need our cooperation. Nobody is innocent, that's the bad news; but the good news is that this means nobody is helpless either.
See here for background: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2016/10/hypernormalisation.html.
And: https://hpanwo-voice.blogspot.com/2009/04/britons-more-fearful-than-ever.html.